this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2023
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Nature and Gardening
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Yesss a place to talk about the little poop noodles! I've had a bin going for about 2 years. I use a stacking bin with 5 trays. After starting it, I realised that the whole CFT idea doesn't work as well as I was expecting, so essentially I treat them as independent bins that the wormies are able to move between freely.
I've found that a pretty laid back approach to feeding them works the best for me. Whenever I have kitchen scraps, I toss them on top. I add a small part of our coffee grounds (we drink a good amount), the rest goes straight into the garden. And whenever I feed I toss in a similar amount of dry shredded cardboard. When a tray is full, I move another one to the top and start feeding that.
For bedding, I just use the cardboard I toss in continuously, and lots of small bits of browns that are too big to be composted by the worms. Like small sticks, some corn cobs that went in whole (the worms love to chill inside them), a load of pistachio shells that have been in there for a year that the baby worms always sit in, etc. Whenever I sift out a tray all that stuff just goes right back into the new one I'm filling, the worms seem to love it.
Seems to work well for me! Only problem I ran into recently was we had a lot of rain, and apparently so much moisture got in through the air holes that parts of the bin turned anaerobic. Which apparently attracted a whole lot of ants. Fortunately I managed to dry out the bin a bit, and got rid of most of the ants. So all's well in noodle town again.
Can't argue with any of that. Sounds like you and the worms doing great!
The consistent habitat is something I've never thought about. I do mix castings from one side to the new side in amongst the new bedding to accelerate the bacterial load and help the process of breakdown, I always imagined the biochar helps with that too on the microscopic level. I suppose a lot of worms hang out in weird places in my farm as well; down below in the channeling that's been created on the wood base, on the sides, on the lip etc.
Make sure you add !composting@slrpnk.net like @drk@slrpnk.net said. At some point in the future, who knows where the niche stuff will go once the community fills up.
Yeah I saw the composting community and subbed right away! I only joined Lemmy yesterday, so still getting my bearings, but it's been so nice to hunt for all these small niche communities.
I just checked and it's still reading 2 subscribers. Wonder how long it takes to update.
A lot to learn for all of us... Have fun with it all!
Interesting: on slrpnk.net (so where the community lives) I see '3 users' and a whopping '17 subscribers'. On lemmy.ml, the community shows '3 users' but only '2 subscribers'. And it doesn't seem that being a mod gives you any more numbers or insights whatsoever.
Not that I'd bother to ask the question but I'm sure one day we will figure that out. Is it subscribers from your own personal instance that shows, like 2 from Lemmy.ml and 2 from beehaw?